STI Turnt up to 11 – Devin’s Wicked Fast Subaru

I started apexjunky in the interest to expanding the community and met Devin via social media. We chatted a little bit about his autocross video promo vid I shared a while ago and got to know that he’s got one of the craziest STI builds I’ve seen for autocross build (save the Bollenbecker STI here in San Diego, but that car is still under wraps for the time being). Besides, this one is World Rally Blue and it’s amazing to have someone take what I consider one the sexiest STI’s ever made, and turn a build up to eleven. Grab a beverage, because this is a good one.

What type of car do you have?

She’s a 2006 Subaru Impreza WRX STi. I got really lucky back in 2008 when I found her. A gentleman in Wyoming had just put the car up on Craigslist for $26,000, and she was pristine. I was fortunate enough to be the first responder and he was kind enough to drive the car down to Colorado for me – she literally turned 15,000 miles during the test-drive after being pre-buyer-inspected at Subaru. I gave him an extra $200 for his trouble, took the car off his hands and ran like hell!

A lot of people give their cars nicknames/actual names. Do you have one for your STI? If so how did you come about choosing it?

This is one that a lot of people sort of look at me weird about. My father and I had named a couple of previous vehicles after dragon-like names, and though my father’s S2000-CR had slipped from that, he had gotten me interested in traditional Scottish Gaelic names. As such, we went looking to see what there was on offer for ‘Dragon’ in that language. We quickly found one we both liked. “Sumaire” (‘Sue-Myth-Uh’) – which, in the old tongue, means ‘Serpent’, ‘Dragon’, and ‘Lethal Weapon’. Fitting enough, yes? ^_^

Rear seat and related hardware, as well as all factory seat-belts removed

Air conditioning and sound system removed

Weight class-legal weight reduction of various forms all over chassis

The car has within it a sequential gear box. What was the reason for this upgrade and how far up the priority list was it when building the car?

You may laugh, but the primary reason was actually not for the performance aspect: It was, in fact, an attempt to ensure we could not mis-shift on course. The embarrassing truth is that my father and I both (although more him than I – sorry, dad!) have demonstrated the ability to miss a gear-change when going from second gear to third when driving his beautifully stock/street-class prepped S2000-CR. Generally ending up in first gear, we would often find the car suddenly becoming front-wheel-drive and rear-wheel-steer, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that while the S2000 would be at least moderately forgiving of such a mistake – simply acting like you had yanked on the hand-brake very, very sharply, spinning the car – with Sumaire being both AWD and on massive R-compound tires, we realized that she would absolutely NOT be so forgiving. Visions of exploding engines at 15,000 RPM filled my mind and caused me to start looking for solutions. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that the only real solution was a sequential gearbox.

Initially, when we asked about a sequential box, the first answer was along the lines of $50-60k, which immediately had us do an about-face and walk away from the idea… But when it was discovered that units existed that were a much more reasonable price (roughly a quarter of the previous quote), it became something we could stomach. We initially tried to go with a Samsonas sequential dog-ring-engagement gearbox (my good friend Kai pointed it out to me, bringing up the possibility that such options existed), but after a lengthy back-and-forth trying to get them to make a sequential box with the non-sequential gear ratios, they finally answered “We can do it, but you’ll be waiting a long time.” Understandably, we immediately moved on, and luckily found the KAPS R4 unit. Seeing that it was basically everything we wanted, we dove on it, and discovered it was a superior unit to the Samsonas in certain ways as well (ease of internals installation, shifter-load sensor, etc.).

Needless to say, we’re satisfied with the end-result.

Have you always wanted to build a STI? If not what other cars have you built/modified?

I’ve helped a variety of friends build a variety of cars (though I’ll admit that a large amount of the work that I did was research and development), but there are really three cars that should be considered an answer under this question. It’s kind of funny – I actually have my good friend Tanner to thank for getting me into Subarus, although in hindsight, I actually have noticed that in all of the video games I used to play, I always tended towards Subarus anyway for whatever reason.

I started out as a Honda guy, and had great pride in my ’95 Honda Accord coupe (nicknamed the ‘Dragon’ by me, and he ‘Queen Elizabeth’ by my father). Again, with the power of hindsight, I can see now that the car was dirt-slow as a Street Touring car, but she was still a great street-car (at least, would have been, had I left the bloody air conditioning alone!). While she made a lovely noise (all intake, quiet exhaust), she made very little actual power, and did not turn particularly well – she did stop really well, though! She just couldn’t get going again, haha!

After about a season and a half with that car, we had finished the car that my dad had purchased specifically for Autocross use: a 1989 Honda Civic Si hatchback that, in keeping with the dragon-related motif, my father and I dubbed “Hatchling”. We selected this car because of its historic competitiveness, and because we could find the specs online to build it to with relative ease, thanks to RedShift Motorsports. It was an interesting car, and though my dad never really got the hang of front-wheel-drive, it did at least prepare me for the idea of standing on the throttle if the rear end started to come around.

Sadly, there was a critical flaw with this car that we never discovered until after we had sold the car to my friend Aaron: The car had the wrong bloody gearbox in it! It turns out that we had the longest gears possible to get for an EF-chassis 5-speed gearbox, when the thing should’ve had the shortest gears available – the end-result was nearly a 25% loss of torque to the wheels. Regardless, the car taught us a lot about driving lines, and in a way, got me ready for the next SCCA Solo car: My father’s S2000-CR.

The third car that is worth mentioning is the only one of the three I still have – my 2000 Subaru Impreza 2.5RS coupe, named “Ainneamhag” (“Ahnya-vahkh” traditional Scottish Gaelic for ‘Phoenix’). This is a car that, unfortunately, has EARNED her name… Thankfully, not including the whole “fiery rebirth” part. But between a few different severe complications with my initial acquisition of her, and then the water pump literally exploding less than one hundred miles after I got her (necessitating a new engine block from Subaru, since we had no idea what sort of damage/warping had happened… And, at the time, the SCCA Rallycross rules did not list any allowance for any modification to the engine block for rebuilding an engine, i.e. 0.020” overbore or decking the block to eliminate warping, for instance).

Anyway, now-a-days the RS is on the way to becoming fully SCCA Rallycross Prepared-AWD prepped. Between the Feal 441 Gravel-spec coilovers, some Group-N bits holding the powertrain in place, snatching the STi’s old seats and tossing them in, and then finally topping it all off with some 15” Enkei RCG4 wheels and 195-wide D-Mack DMG-2 medium-compound tires. The car is a blast to drive, but I have not gotten out in the dirt NEARLY as much as I wish I had since getting her up and running. So much of the focus has been on Sumaire that Ainneamhag unfortunately just sorta gets put aside. Hoping to change that a little in 2016. Hopefully less transporting Sumaire to and from 3R for repairs and refits, and more taking cars out to their respective events and just driving them as much as I can.

Let’s talk suspension. Given the geometry what do you think is one thing the car could do better (i.e. sweepers, hairpins, transients)?

I think this is actually the most awkward question to answer, because frankly, I don’t really HAVE an answer. All things considered, what this car can do is… Well, the best way to put it was coined by Chris Gladu when he rode along last year: “This car can do silly things.” All things considered, she’s about as balanced as one could ever hope for her to be, though I’m sure we will still pick up little advantages here and there over time as the car continues development.

The only genuinely-problematic issue we’ve had is with the front dampers binding for whatever reason if we crank the rebound up too much, resulting in an ugly oscillation during corner-exit acceleration – and I DO mean UGLY. Those involved in the project are really quite very surprised that the car is still operating on the CV-axles that she came with from Subaru off the assembly line! I actually took spare brand new OEM front and rear units with me to nationals, half-way expecting there to likely be a problem requiring replacement. Drop the rebound damping back down again, however, and the car smooths right back out again – and the difference in the handling from the damper change is, thankfully, seemingly negligible.

What would you say the car’s primary strength is?

If I had to put my finger one single aspect of the car, it’s clearly the sheer, brutal acceleration of the car. That, combined with the near-instantaneous, thoughtless gear-changes and fairly minimal turbo-lag, the car can accelerate with maximum torque at any virtually any speed. Randy Hickman pointed out that it’s the one car in all of the RMSolo group that he can tell within about a half-second that the car is accelerating after I put my foot down. The acceleration rate is stupid. Of course, she’s hardly a one-trick pony – the car’s handling and braking systems are beautifully well set-up, as well.

Do you think the car stands a good chance against a newer chassis, say a built GTR or even a newer gen STI given the same level of effort?

GT-Rs can be intimidating – especially when you look at the 800-hp monster that frequents nationals – but all-in-all, at the risk of sounding cocky: The answer is simply, “Yes. Absolutely.”

We’re basically at (or at least close to) the limit of the kind of power that can be even used realistically in an Autocross vehicle, so it isn’t like some other car will be able to come along and just dominate over us in terms of acceleration, and the car’s handling is exceptional, *especially* for how heavy she is. Chris Mayfield commented during early testing, when the car had just received the 315-wide Hoosiers for the first time (no aero, no super-ridiculous powerplant or gearbox, and the car weighed some 300-400 lbs more than she does now), that Sumaire already handled pretty much like Hsun Chen’s “Evo of Doom” with which Mayfield had taken the SM National Championship with a few years back. With that in mind, we knew we were on the right track.

Now, it should be said that this is leaving out the driver-mod aspect (we’re working on those).

Street Mod is lovingly called the “Spend Money” class within the SCCA. Do you think it’s possible to be competitive in Street Mod with a restricted budget?

Sometimes I wonder about the ‘lovingly’ part of that statement, but…

It’s funny that you ask that now, because for the last two months I’ve actually been involved in an SSM build that is basically designed around a limited budget idea, and the potential is absurd. However, it is remarkably difficult to pull this off. You have to be a talented engineer and fabricator, everything has to come together just right, and the stars and planets have to be in alignment, and you have to stumble across a lot of used, good-condition parts… But it can happen. That being said, counting on lucking yourself into such a build is something that generally never works out.

Would I try to build something competitive in this class on a restricted budget? No, because even with our fairly unrestricted budget, when things have gone wrong or backfired, it has strained our resources quite a lot.

The EJ25 is/was the golden child of Subaru for the longest time, but people have been running into issues making reliable power. After doing some prep work on your car, how robust has this engine been for you while making the power that you were happy with?

Oh, you just had to ask that, didn’t you?

The EJ engine is a temperamental beast to say the least. It’s flawed, and demands a lot of attention to detail to work properly at a high level with anything even resembling reliability. Truth be told, however, if it were not for the corners, we would be in great shape! Unfortunately, there are corners in Autocross. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that there are a few of them! The biggest issue we’ve had with this thing is keeping the oil where the oil pickup can actually get at it. The truth of the matter is that the EJ engine was never designed with these sorts of extremes (up to and EXCEEDING 2.0 peak G in the corners). Oil vapor has been an absurdly irritating problem, and the oil sloshes around so much that, even with a 6-quart baffled oil pan and windage tray filled to 6.5 quarts, we have been getting oil pressure dips in the corners anyway, and dumping nearly a third of a quart of oil out of the engine per run (captured by the air/oil separation system)! As a result, unfortunately, the now-not-even-six-month-old race engine is already having to be rebuilt because of excessive bearing wear. This time around, however, we are getting a Daily dry-sump oiling system to solve what ails us.

An interesting challenge to building an SM-class Subaru is getting enough air to cool the intercooler. There just is not really much room up front for an intercooler upgrade without chopping up or removing the front bumper beam, but since either of those options is a big no-no for a variety of reasons, it is interesting trying to sort out a solution. For now, we are at least satisfied (satisfied ENOUGH, anyway) to stick with the gigantic top-mount intercooler and the fan-pack that gets plopped onto it between runs while the car is stationary.

A random other issue has popped up as well, but this I think is simply unique to our engine: one of the exhaust valves started not sealing properly, resulting in a 60% leak-down problem in cylinder 2. Hopefully during the rebuild that includes the dry-sump installation, this issue will be fixed, never to rear its ugly head again. It’s difficult enough to try to get an ethanol-based engine to fire during the Colorado winter WITHOUT this issue.

Do you have any regrets in this build? What would you have done differently?

In all honesty, yes. Two big ones.

Firstly, the wing. While I love the end result to death from an aesthetic point of view, the WRC wing was an absolute nightmare. As far as we are concerned, the company we purchased it from left us feeling pretty bitter.

Firstly, they charged WAY too much for the fiberglass version of the WRC wing. They wrapped the massive, heavy fiberglass WRC wing in small-cell bubble-wrap, tossed it into an over-sized box with NO packing material whatsoever. This resulted in it moving and banging about during shipping all the way over to the United States, resulting in a severely damaged unit by the time it arrived.

The vendor and the shipping company split the cost of the repairs, but still! The irony is that it’s a good thing they did that, because while 3R cut it apart to rebuild it, it was discovered that the mounting equipment to mount the big, heavy, aerodynamic device they had cast wing nuts into the fiberglass to hold it on.

If someone had bought this to use on an actual stage rally car, it’d be ripped clean off the first time the car jumped! In addition to that, it was discovered that apparently you need a special type of trunk to mount the wing to, because it sure did not match up to the OEM trunk in any way, which would have been nice to know at the time of purchase. As a result it had to be modified to fit to the OEM aluminum Spec-C trunk-lid that the car now had.

After a variety of other issues (thankfully smaller), the wing was finally painted and installed… If I had it all to do over again, I would have just forgotten about it and gone with a serious competition wing. As it is, though, I love how she looks – I personally think that the car looks absolutely hideous with a GT-style wing, but I will have to admit eventually that we want the better function of a GT-style rear wing.

Eventually. I just wish we had not gone through all of that trouble – and saved a few thousand dollars, too. For now, we’re leaving the wing on, since at least she looks good and works well enough.

The second big regret has already been mentioned, and that is not just going with a dry-sump system initially when we installed the new race engine. It would have definitely allowed us a lot more relaxed atmosphere at nationals, rather than having to deal with an overflowing oil catch cans pouring oil out over the front splitter after every single run; and it would have prevented us from having to rebuild the engine after only half a season. Hindsight 20-20…

With the 2016 National Level schedule set for the SCCA , how many events do you plan on doing this year with the car?

Nationally? It’s hard to say, but it’s likely that the answer is going to be “not many” truth be told. Locally, barring mechanical issue or schedule conflict (knock on wood), all of them. We do have every intent to get to Nationals this year, however, and we’ll almost certainly participate in the Colorado National Tour event.

Are there any sponsors you would like to acknowledge for their assistance in getting your car to the way that it is?

There is actually no manufacturer sponsorship involved in this car, I am rather proud to state for the record. HOWEVER – this entire project simply would NOT have been possible without the support, technical skill, and knowledge (and willingness to work late – and I mean LATE – into the night) of the guys at 3R Auto/Racing. Robert, Chris, Maciek, Dax, Keith, Mark, Aaron, Bob and everyone else over there have contributed their time and hard work towards the building of what can only be described as a truly unique monster. It’s still somewhat strange to think that Sumaire is their first real attempt at building a serious Subaru. That should give you some idea of just how clever these people really are.

As a small token of appreciation, of course, I try to represent them in the Subaru world whenever I can. They have every right to be proud and stand in the spotlight as one of the greatest race shops out there, and deserve the recognition of that fact. I also do the best I can to drive Sumaire well enough to show that fact to those watching (not always succeeding, by any means, but not for a lack of trying).

While not a manufacturer, this car has one real sponsor, and he is most certainly worthy of mentioning, because without him, Sumaire would not be what she is today, or what she will be in the future. That man is none other than my team-mate, co-driver and (most importantly) father, Rudy Ramsey. Thank you for everything, Dad. (It should be mentioned, however, that he is enjoying the heck out of driving the car, as well – in fact, I have never seen him smiling so much behind the wheel of a car, before. Not even his own.)

As most of raced cars undergo continuous changes, what are the next plans for the car?

Truth be told, we really do hope to stop building the car for awhile and just drive the bloody thing. Unfortunately said hope is already dashed for the near future, since we are still stuck doing an engine rebuild because of the aforementioned excessive bearing wear and malfunctioning exhaust valve. There is still a laundry-list of things to do, but the biggest thing on the list is by-far-and-away the Daily dry-sump system. In addition to that, however, the suspension will be getting a significant revision this year with new dampers from KW, better lateral links from MSI (no more bushings to flex), and we’re researching the potential for a custom v-mount intercooler system that can be put into place while still supporting the rule of “no modifications to the bumper beams”.

Fingers crossed that something relatively straight-forward actually presents itself as the solution. This will, of course, mean that the hood will be getting chopped up – no more signature huge scoop, I’m sad to say. The rear wing (which cost us so much time and money!) will likely also be getting replaced with a competition wing. Sad day, with those last two things. I really like how the car looks right now. Oh, well, right? Form has to be dictated by function at this level.

We’ll also be switching to an external wastegate system for the turbocharger. The internally-gated configuration has a flap that’s just too large, and has no fine control (which is, well… Important). Fingers crossed THAT part goes smoothly.

Like I said, though, there’s a laundry list, but there’s the biggest parts.

Are there any videos of the car you would like to share?

Sure! I have an onboard video that’s worth mentioning and happily there are a couple of other individuals who captured video of the car in action, and while both of them show my driving skill leaves a lot to be desired, I at least have the excuse of lack of familiarity with the car for one reason or another in both of the exterior videos… Of course, that is part of the reason why the videos are fun to watch.

My favorite onboard video unfortunately has the issue of having happened at the very last event while the front suspension was still acting up, causing the ugly undulations that pitched the car around somewhat violently during corner-exit acceleration. Despite this issue, however, it is the first (and so-far only) time I have managed to ever score a 1000-point index score.
Side-cam:

Cabin-cam:

Here’s a video shot by my friend Chris (co-driver with my father at nationals and co-developer of Sumaire) of the first time we had the new powertrain in the car, and (more importantly) had installed the new front control arms by Ray Cunningham. We did not think we would have to adjust the rear suspension alignment to re-balance the car, so the rear was still in its (previously-well-balanced) configuration… Needless to say, after this event, more rear camber was added to balance for the new front grip:

This video is from the 2015 National Championship that a gentleman named Shane was kind enough to post up for me. I was still trying to get used to the new power the car had – and, well, was having a bit too much fun with it for my own good. Can you blame me? Before nationals, the car had 470 horsepower – at nationals she suddenly had 605.